All over the internet people are arguing over whether ‘Merriweather Post Pavillion’ by Animal Collective is the album of the year or not. Personally I feel it might be tiny bit premature considering this is twenty-first day of the year, and years typically contain 365 days. I finally listened to the whole thing (stream the entire album here on NPR). My impressions are still forming. My first impression was that it was really awesome and great (this as I was listening to ‘In The Flowers’, the first track). After that things blurred together into most of an hour of noise and song blended into a slightly repetitious but experimentally earthy, jangly cocktail that makes me think of cymbal monkeys and the crazy, charged up mating displays of tropical birds.

Don’t get me wrong, each song stood on it’s own, but within individual songs the sound did lean towards monotony at times. Since it was all one stream I lost track of what song I was on, which was frustrating but not at all the band’s fault, as clearly the songs were meant to run together. I just can’t really review them individually (going back to the site to get the link I see now that the songs can be played one by one. Oh well.). I recognized ‘My Girls’, since it’s been popping up all over the place and I’ve heard it about ten times now. As stated above I really liked ‘In the Flowers’. I’d pay for that, certainly.

There were others that I liked too, but alas, I don’t know what they were. ‘No More Running’ was a very interesting song, with a watery shimmer cascading into an off-tune chorus that falls off like a waterfall into a gorge. ‘Brother Sport’ was featured on this site in December, and I do love the tribal dance feeling of it. If there’s one thing Animal Collective does not lack it’s unfettered creativity flowing out of boundless energy. They manage to pull together synthetic and natural, digital and vocal, and mash it all into a wild, almost hallucinogenic concoction.

It also didn’t help that the stream was messy and much rougher than a clean recording, and that ended up giving me a headache as I was listening. So beware when streaming. Anyway… as to whether it’s the best album of the year…. I’m not getting involved in that argument. Not just yet.

I give it a 8.5 out of 10. And I can be honest and say I might like it better if I’d heard a really clean version.

8.5/10